Epistemic status: something of a rant. Is not meant to make claims about the general capabilities (or lack thereof) of LLMs (beyond their prose), but observations about how society seems to use them excessively without being perfectly candid about it.

Nanobanana's take on the situation

Over the past few months, it has become a bit of a running gag that every evening, I inform my girlfriend of the multiple cases of LLM slop I encountered in the wild throughout the day[1]. And pretty much every day, I have several cases to report. These typically involve:

• Blog posts (including at least four cases from 2026 on LessWrong[2], where I've even seen one author use (at least partially) AI-generated text in replies to comments)
• YouTube videos
• At least one keynote speech from the CEO of a tech company
• Messages from coworkers
• Several personal messages from a friend
• News articles
• Press releases
• Tweets[3]
• Many subreddits, including, ironically, ones about getting LLMs to sound more human-like, such as /r/humanizing/ and /r/humanizeAIwriting/

Exhibit 1: The all-time top-rated post on /r/humanize - if TwainGPT is so great, why didn't they use it for this post? Many other posts [...]

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Outline:

(07:34) What Does This Tell Us About the World?

(10:49) Why Are People Doing This?

(12:25) Why Do I Care?

(12:34) Honesty / Truth / Authenticity

(14:29) Correlated Communication

(16:29) Bad Signaling

(17:20) Aesthetics

(18:04) A Unique Point in Time

(19:28) What Do We Do With This?

The original text contained 10 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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